Abstract: Photograph/Philosophy/Technology University of Brighton, in conjunction with Photoworks and PhotoForum, Brighton, England. April 26 - 27 Brighton, quaint seaside resort on coast due south of London, is becoming something of a photographic center in England. In fall of 2003 It will host first Brighton Photo Biennial, which will bring ...exciting and important from around country and around world (as one of their promotional pieces announces) to this provincial college town. As a run up to this, on last weekend this past April, University of Brighton, in conjunction with Photoworks and Photoforum, presented Photography/ Philosophy/Technology, a two day conference exploring photography, as noun, and its adjoining adjective, What conference brought most clearly to fore, was how much photographic discourse is still grappling with crisis of indexicality brought on by medium's digitization. It has inevitably caused a paradigm shift in way that we conceive of and contextualize and photographic image--it has in fact led to separation of two and forced us to consider meaning and definition of each and their relation to one another. The conference was organized around two interrelated questions: what is photograph, and, secondly, where is photograph? The latter question implies as Olivier Richon stated, ...that we have lost sight of or that Is perhaps lost, that it has lost a direction perhaps or that we do not find It where it should be, that It has been misplaced, that it remains somewhere, unclaimed, in some lost property office of culture. Indeed. Richon went on to point out a linguistic shift that has occurred In that reflects a deeper semantic, in fact semiological shift: move from photography to photographic, noun to adjective, and then back again to noun in the photographic. This shift suggests a kind of semiological skinning of where signifier is separated from signified to be reconstituted as a sign itself. But this forces question, what then Is signified In the photographic? What is thing to which it is tied? Here is where ground goes a bit liquid and we begin to grapple around In dark, trying to pin down this quite slippery thing. Quite unsurprisingly, this question forces us back to a reconsideration of photography's ontology, in hope that if we can come to some conclusions about It, that this will guide us in our dealings with So Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin were both strongly on agenda at conference. Both locate roots of photography's ontology its ability to embalm The language they use to describe photography's stoppage (Barthes calls it photography's funereal immobility in Camera Lucida) inextricably link it with death and locate it's power In ability to overcome our existential struggle with passage of time. Geoffrey Batchen's paper, 'Fearful Ghost of Former Bloom: What Photography Is, examined photographic reliquary--objects of mourning and memory created by grieving friends and relatives that Incorporate photographs and an eccentric array of collaged elements; wax or hair flowers, embroidery, taxidermy, personal artifacts. They are unique and highly idiosyncratic objects, and Batchen has found a fantastic array of them in all parts of world, dating mostly from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These photographic objects are memorials to deceased, built around a photograph of dead person. They are activated by power of photography's funeral immobility, which places reliquary's subject in an eternal present, living on in a time outside of time. These reliquaries are a form of grieving, just as Barthes's Camera Lucida, centerpiece of which is a snapshot of Barthes's deceased mother, is a form of grieving. …
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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